The Internet is “disappearing”; it’s going away...
Written by Rejean Bourgault on Lundi, 20 Juillet 2009 20:24
This was a headline in Financial Times (FT-IT Review) on March 7th 2001:
When the internet “disappears”, you know it has arrived, a viewpoint from Ed Zander, President and COO of Sun Microsystems. I was in Hong Kong at that time and when I read this article, I thought it was very fascinating.
Ed Zander was adding: “The internet is going away in the same sense that electricity and plumbing did in the 20th century – out of sight and out of mind”. Ed Zander was right, and indeed internet has disappeared; especially for the Generation Y and Cyber.
Here is a good example, from my day to day life during the summer of 2009 to illustrate what Ed Zander was saying. As you might know by now, my family loves mountain bike racing. Saturday night at the dinner table with my wife, our 3 children and my mother-in-law, we were planning our training day planned for the next day, Sunday and we were discussing as well about the upcoming race scheduled for the next Wednesday. We were wondering what would be the weather for the upcoming days and I then simply asked my oldest daughter to look at the weather forecast.
The interesting part began there... My oldest daughter (14) left the dinner table and went to the home family computer to look for the weather forecast. At the same time, my son (10) said right away: “Dad, I can get it much faster than her using my Wii (Nintendo Wii)” and he raced to the basement to check. My Mother-in-law on her side (65) raced to the living room and started to search for the TV remote control while my wife decided to look around for the newspaper…
Guess who won?
My other daughter (12), sitting next to me, who had not left the table, said out loud within just a few seconds: “Sunshine, 23 degrees for Sunday; Wednesday will rain again”. She had simply reached to her iPod Touch and clicked on the weather application.
Note: I could have easily reached for my blackberry to also join the race; but I was so fascinated to see everyone racing to find the best method to obtain the weather forecast that I simply stayed at the table to watch the events.
Think about what I just described for a few minutes. My oldest daughter was using internet from the home computer, my son was using internet on his Wii through our WiFi home wireless network, same for my other daughter using internet on her iPod Touch using our home WiFi connection. If I had also participated in the race with my Blackberry, I would have use internet through the cellular EV-DO CDMA connection (or some other type of 3G network). This represents 4 different streams of Internet connections used simultaneously. None of us were thinking at that point: “We are using the Internet”; especially for my 3 children. It’s the same for all of us today; we don’t think that we are using “plumbing” when we are drinking fresh water from the tap, or we don’t think about electricity when we are using the toaster…
Internet has really disappeared, it’s part of our everyday life, it’s everywhere. Someone tells you that he just booked a vacation in an exotic country, he no longer says: “I went on the Internet and booked my travel”. He simply says: “I booked my vacation yesterday.”
The other interesting aspect in the above example for the “weather race” is the natural selection of devices and tools; the selection of tools by the younger generation versus the reflex of the older generation of where to look for the information. My wife (42) will always look at the newspaper as her first choice and same for my mother-in-law with the TV. The children on their side are going straight for the cyber space, something that seems completely natural to them. You might still be wondering why newspapers around the world are having difficulties and why they are moving faster then ever towards electronic media…
Welcome to a new world.
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